Spring 2008

Wireless networks are conventionally protected against eavesdropping through the use of encryption. Typically, this requires the exchange of cryptographic keys, which for certain networks (e.g. wireless mobile ad hoc networks), may entail high overhead or may be impossible for a given period of time. In this talk, we consider the situation when confidentiality is needed, but no cryptographic keying data is available.

To address this issue we propose the distributed secret sharing problem which is inspired by ideas from secret sharing and the wiretap channel literature. The conventional secret sharing problem is designed for a single user whereas the proposed distributed secret sharing problem is designed for multiple users and is thus better-suited for the network setting. Furthermore, the distributed secret sharing approach allows encoding for confidentiality to be performed without coordination among the users, i.e. without the need to exchange information amongst users or without the usage of any shared secret materials. We further study the role of multi-user interference in such a setting, which induces a new wiretap channel problem. Finally we discuss applications of the distributed secret sharing problem to mobile ad hoc networks.

Bio: William Luh is a graduate student in the department of electrical and computer engineering at Texas A&M University. He received the B.A.Sc. (Honors) from the University of Toronto, and the M.S. from Texas A&M University. His interests are in security, specifically information-theoretic security, as well as multimedia security.

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